New Sumazau?

I am so proud that our Sumazau dance is listed as one of the 50 National Treasures on Malaysia heritage list, according to the news on The Star and Daily Express in early July 2007. To find out more details about the listing, I visited the web site of Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, Malaysia. I could not find the listing, so I did a search with the keyword “Sumazau”. Then I clicked one of the results that led to the page below:

To watch the video clip of Sumazau dance, I clicked on the movie link “.wmv” (Windows Media Video), on its top right corner. A small window pop-up, then I started to see a dance that doesn’t look so familiar to me. I thought I found the wrong video, but the video title was clearly saying “Sumazau Dance”. You can click the link here to see it yourselves. Is this a real Sumazau dance?

Sumazau dance comes with different variations in different regions and tribes, but the general style and movement are quite “standard” that you still can tell whether it is Sumazau. I expect something more “classic” and authentic from a official government source. However, this one seems far too innovative to me.

How come the Sumazau dancers in this video dance more like chicken than birds lah? There was no male partner, too many waist twisting, steps too big. Kind of cute but… funny leh.. Sumazau is a National Heritage. Don’t play play oh.

Not only the rhythm and movement, even the music also doesn’t sound right. In my past experience, I saw only gong and drum were used in most cases. The one played in this video sounds more like the music of other ethnic groups. If everyone confirms it is a wrong dance, maybe I should inform them to do a more proper documentary of Sumazau. I also find that their description about the dance also a bit odd, but I can’t tell what’s wrong. Probably you can read it and tell me…

Another presentation style of Sumazau: